During recent years, computer gaming has gained increasing popularity, and today thousands of players are playing on-line games all around the world. Predictably, interactive computer gaming played on on-line enabled platforms has blurred the line between games and other entertainment or communication media, and the avenues that are being explored in the development of gaming might well break new ground for interactive Internet applications in all areas of business relations and social life.
Due to their dynamic nature and specific appeal to certain audiences, computer games and especially games played on Internet enabled platforms provide the ideal vehicle for Internet advertising. Not only is it possible for an advertiser to target directly a specific group of customers, but optionally advertisements are incorporated directly into the computer game, enabling something akin to the well-known concept of product placement. It would be advantageous to have at hand a method and system for effectively combining the two concepts elucidated above, and thus building a bridge from the advertising world to the world of computer gaming.
However, an advertising enabled game suffers from a complexity that is not seen in most other advertising venues. Often, one or more ads are scattered across a virtual game world, and presentation of the ads depends on game play progression. Furthermore, some spots for displaying ads are adjacent to buildings or objects or other spots, all of which contribute to a given spot being more or less appealing than other spots. Additionally, games optionally support multi-media spots.
There are many types of advertisements including product placements, interstitial advertisements, free product giveaways, contests, promotions, coupons, and other innovative ways to spread an advertisement. Unfortunately, heretofore only product placements and banner advertisements within video games have been explored. This stems from the very technology on which video games are founded.
Early advertising on the Internet usually took the form of banner advertisements diaplayed on web sites. A cost of these advertisements was based on a number of times each page including a known advertisement was uploaded to an end-user system for display. For example, each time the web site is uploaded money accrues to the owner of the web site. The advertiser paid a service provider for delivery of the banner advertisement and the service provider then paid the web site owner at intervals. Unfortunately, this model was heavily abused, for example by providing a system with an automated routine to reload a web site with a banner advertisement, repeatedly.
It is now more common to provide banner advertisements that only result in revenue to the owner of a web site in response to an acquisition—a user clicks on the banner. In this way, the revenue model for a banner advertisement involves a level of user interaction with the banner that is verifiable. Further, a system within a same physical location accessing a web site is typically limited within a predetermined period of time to generating accrued revenue only once—for example daily. This limits many forms of abuse. A person of skill in the art will appreciate that when a specific advertisement is provided in a video game, absent a verifiable interaction of a gamer with the advertisement, it is unclear if the gamer has noticed the advertisement. For example, if a static advertisement is provided to a gamer while game software is being loaded it is difficult to speculate let alone determine how effective the advertisement is simply because the gamer does not acknowledge viewing the advertisement.
In the context of video game advertising, it would be highly beneficial to support several advertising models. However, for many action type video games, it is not reasonable to expect a user of a video game to divert their attention from the video game in order to respond to an advertisement. Unfortunately, with the additional complexity of advertisement placement comes an additional complexity in reporting of impressions. What forms an impression is greatly complicated because game play affects angle of view, visibility, length of time in which an impression is provided, and repetition of impressions. Though in the world of Internet advertising, impression quality measures are obviated by reporting acquisitions in the form of “click throughs” instead of impressions, for video games, acquisitions are difficult to measure.
It would be beneficial to provide additional features within video games that enhance the business case for developing the games while enhancing an experience of a user.